A networking adaptor often supports two or four physical ports connecting to a network (e.g., Ethernet, Fibre Channel, or the like). Typically, each port is associated with a data path capable of supporting one quarter (in a four port case) or half (in a two port case) of throughput of the entire adaptor. In some configurations where there is only one physical port and four data links employed, one data path will need to be capable of supporting the bandwidth requirement of the entire adaptor. That is four or two times of a regular data path bandwidth. Increasing the data path to support four times the throughput will be costly in terms of gate-count, power, and complexity with a wider data path, higher clock frequency and new/rewritten frame parsers to support the wider data path.